It's been a wild ride for Jim Mergard, a respect name in the chipmaking and processor design industry. Mr. Mergard enjoyed a successful 16-year stint with Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), before leaving the chipmaker in late 2011. According toThe Wall Street Journal, Mr. Mergard's specialty was low power systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). He reportedly was the "brains" behind development of AMD's hot-selling "accelerated processing units", guiding them through the prototype phase.

Speculation is running wild regarding whether Mr. Mergard's expertise will be used simply to produce better SoCs for i-devices, or for a more novel project, such as an in-house computer central processing unit.

For years Apple heavily used and contributed to the PowerPC architecture. But some suspect it may have second thoughts about switching to Intel Corp. (INTC) chips. After all, Apple prefers to keep as much of its ecosystem as it can in-house, leaving the rest to anonymous unnamed suppliers. Intel's desire for prominent branding represents somewhat of a values conflict for Apple.

Jim Mergard has joined up with Apple [Image Source: The Tech Journal].

But only time can tell what possibilities might be looming for the new recruit.

For now it's just one more example of Apple's longtrack record of aggressively poaching its market rival's best talent. That poaching has led to numerous complaints over the years, but under the new leadership of Tim Cook Apple shows no signs of stopping the aggressive tactic.

quote: Most people the ability to build their own PC wouldn't be caught dead near a Mac or any other OEM PC.

Depends. Once you get into laptops then the question isn't so easy given that building a laptop isn't really an option. The majority of Mac sales are laptops. I know loads of people that even if they don't have a Mac desktop, they certainly have a Mac laptop.

Part of the reason is that OS X is an excellent laptop OS, and part of it is pinned on OEMs. Most laptops outside of Lenovos and Macs are trash. Ones that do measure up, HP Elitebooks for example, are so expensive that they make a retina MBP look like a bargain.

quote: you are throwing out extreme examples to try to disprove a point that you know is true.

Right, because everyone that uses a PC is a super genius and everyone that uses a Mac is an idiot. Please, given that Windows has a majority of the market it can be easily in inferred that that the attributes you pin on the "casual" Mac user is easily applied to the average PC user as well. Hell, most technically illiterate people I know are the ones who need help with their cheap Windows machines because something screwed up or it got infected because they click every GD thing in their browser.

A higher percentage of OS X users actually uses MS Office and other professional software packages than Windows users, but it isn't the first thing I'd bring out in a discussion either. This is obviously because the OS X userbase is so much smaller, thus skewing more professional. Obviously it is a consumer platform as Windows is, but the cost of entry combined with its UNIX underpinnings also means that it'll appeal to more professionals. Hell, most of Apple's customers were workstation professionals back in the PPC days, before Apple focused on being a mass market company.

Either way, I still think that placing a blanket statement like that on respective userbases like that is silly. I know technically proficient people on either platform. I myself am on both. People on message boards insist on taking the discussion there though, which is ridiculous.

whatever man, you make way too much of a tongue in cheek comment and jump off writing paragraphs about that while ignoring the whole point of this thread. The fact that Apple copies more than they are copy. reclaimer inferred that Apple poaching Samsung employees kind of shows that Samsung has something that Apple wants. Apple poaches a lot of people from Google as well and you know it. They claim they're being copied yet everyone else is coming out with most things first and they're hiring people away from everyone else, which is perfectly fair' they just need to drop the copy falsehood and innovate.

You notice that you are avoiding that like the plague? answer that or STFU